Postscript: Charles Rosen

Charles Rosen died on December 9th. Read Jeremy Denk. Photograph from 1969 by Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty.

To visit the pianist and thinker Charles Rosen, you walked down a long corridor lined with bookshelves, past the complete works of famous and obscure writers, past a cabinet containing old French spoons, glassware, strange utensils—true dusty bric-a-brac, the fruits of decades of Parisian browsing. At the end of the corridor was the nerve center: a piano stacked with music, a desk stuffed with papers, a threadbare couch, and a book-covered coffee table. It was desperately unhip. But it was affecting and intense, the accumulation of things, of ideas, and Charles’s shuffle. You felt a kind of slow frenzy at his place—connections mounting upon connections, understanding upon understanding. Erosion in reverse.

Charles died two Sundays ago. When I came across the word “discursive” in one of his obituaries, I laughed: Charles was really a spigot of information that could not be shut off by any normal means. My first close encounter was in 2007. It was a dinner that began innocently enough around 7 P.M. Well after midnight, there I was, listening in what I hoped resembled rapt attention while he narrated—for reasons that, even then, I couldn’t recall—the plots of several plays by Alan Ayckbourn. My brain had become an achy fuzz. One of the hosts kept trying to get Charles off track by telling filthy Yiddish jokes, which Charles divinely ignored, his expression a mix of pretended confusion and distaste. At some point the other host explained to me that if I wanted to survive, I had to just get up in the middle of a sentence and flee for the hills. This eighty-year-old man was outlasting me. I would sadly have to be rude in order to preserve what was left of my sanity.

Charles’s obituaries call him a “polymath,” a “scholar-musician;” they laud his “ferocious intelligence,” his “all-around brilliance.” Behind all these epithets lurks the unavoidable and vexing question: Should a musician have a brain? I mean, a brain over and above what’s necessary to move the fingers, eat, sleep, make charming chitchat at gala dinners with sponsors, etc. We say “thinking musician” as if it were a freakish breed, like a peacock that talks, distracting you from its glorious feathers. There was something freakish about Charles Rosen, like any miracle. It didn’t seem like he should still exist, in 2012. As he reached back in memory to cite “The Art of the Fugue” or to quote a poem by Baudelaire or castigate you for your ignorance of Valencia oranges, you marvelled at the volume of information, and later, at the love he still had for it all. Mid-meal he’d shuffle to the piano to demonstrate. Critics often said that his playing was cerebral or stiff, but his playing in private felt wonderfully wayward, Romantic, old-school. True, sometimes it was just erratically erratic, but it could also be meaningfully erratic, inspired erratic: precious liberty from a more forgiving time.

Just go read (or reread) “The Classical Style.” There’s plenty there for everyone. For instance, his writing about the sexual charge of Mozart:

In all of Mozart’s supreme expressions of suffering and terror … there is something shockingly voluptuous. Nor does this detract from its power or effectiveness: the grief and the sensuality strengthen each other, and end by becoming indivisible, indistinguishable one from the other.

That’s a beautiful and profoundly true observation which distinguishes him from Haydn and Beethoven. Here’s a lovely, intricate passage on Haydn’s pastoral mode:

The pretension of Haydn’s symphonies to a simplicity that appears to come from Nature itself is no mask but the true claim of a style whose command over the whole range of technique is so great that it can ingenuously afford to disdain the outward appearance of high art. Pastoral is generally ironic, with the irony of one who aspires to less than he deserves, hoping he will be granted more. But Haydn’s pastoral style is more generous, with all its irony: it is the true heroic pastoral that cheerfully lays claim to the sublime, without yielding any of the innocence and simplicity won by art.

These rhapsodic parts are wonderful, but I’ll admit that my favorite, life-changing parts of “The Classical Style” are the blow-by-blow accounts of great passages of music in the wonkiest of terms. He delves into the exposition of Mozart’s piano concerto in E-flat, K. 271, showing how each new idea fulfills various needs raised by the last, while leaving others still open: a continuous game of symmetry and asymmetry, expectation and fulfillment, hiding beneath the innocent surface. If you’re a musician and you know this piece by ear (and perhaps too well), this workaday explanation induces a series of almost musical groans and ecstasies—“Yes, that’s exactly what happens”; “Oh Charles, you are so right”; “Mozart you jerk for being so brilliant and being able to hide your brilliance so elegantly.” Then the habit falls away, and you become Charles listening to Mozart—intelligently, structurally, but gleefully. Charles insists on addressing the notes; but he shows us how behind the notes are felt needs, requirements, laws of how things ought to be—a whole system of judgment, of taste, of meaning. (And against this structural set of needs, the strain of imagination, of audacity.) The book, against all odds, and against all the efforts of the author, occasionally feels like a page-turner, a thriller: these three geniuses—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—building on each other’s discoveries, like scientists almost, creating unprecedented inventions, invoking a golden era of form meeting content.

Charles got in a lot of disputes: he could be quite wicked; he wrote a lot of hilarious letters about others’ incompetence. One of his favorite anecdotes involved a prominent music writer in a prominent publication who had referred to three modulations to D-flat major in an opera of Verdi. At that first dinner, he observed that in fact a) none of them were modulations, and b) none of them went to D-flat major. Ouch (also a bit of hyperbole). He loved when people were epically wrong; along with the completeness of the takedown, there was the neatness with which it could be phrased, like a cherry on top. He was a lot of fun in snark mode, but it made me think about separating the desire for truth from the need to be right. The most beautiful element of Charles, for me, was after all this learning and accumulation, the smile with which he would play some beloved modulation, or demonstrate some trick of pedalling: suddenly again a child, innocence meeting knowledge at the end of the road. When I played Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” for him, he showed me how releasing the pedal in the middle of a held chord actually creates a crescendo in the bass—in the middle of a sustained note eerily an unnoticed voice comes alive. When I got the effect he wanted, he beamed with real pleasure, aesthetic pleasure, and the pleasure of having communicated something precious—the kind of pleasure that life should be all about.

In October, I went over to his apartment and played Brahms Op. 118 for him. Despite the dual influences of pain and painkillers, he stopped me continuously, to observe a middle voice, a pedalling, or unseen landmarks that governed interpretation. So many brilliant distinctions, and so much faith in the power of an idea. After stopping me almost every bar to painstakingly observe details of the score that I had missed, he said “Jeremy, you really need to make this piece your own.” Charles, I thought, thanks for that pithy summary of the Catch-22 of classical music. I played something else. He began to doze off a bit in between observations, then wake and resume.

The image I have right now is Charles looking over the whole puzzle of culture, all the well-worn, greasy, handled pieces scattered in a million directions, spread over the carpet, unsolvable. He had an unending supply of discoveries and clues and he had faith that if you looked at the pieces properly, their sense and connections would reveal themselves. He would hold up a few pieces at a time, think about them, then go to the next; he was not overwhelmed by the vastness of the puzzle.

Photograph from 1969 by Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty.

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